The Rapture Edition

As you may know by now, there's a group of mostly American Christians who expect to go to heaven tomorrow (Saturday, May 21, 2011). Left behind to suffer for about five months of floods, earthquakes, fires, and pestilence will be everyone else, including but not limited to the Humanists, the Muslims, the Jews, the Hindus, the Rastafarians, and the Scientologists. Then we'll go to hell and the world will come to an end.

Such a nice theology. 

Rapture cults exhibit the epitome of the exclusionary thinking by which established religious groups grow their mystique. You have to be just so, or you can't have the good stuff that we control. Maybe your mother needs to be of a certain ethnic heritage, or your parents have to baptize you in the correct liquid, or you have to be publicly penitent about something bad that you pretend that you did, or you need to wear a tent in public. Whatever. It's all meant to exert control over your mind, over your behavior, and most of all over your community and culture. The requirements for religious membership become ingrained in community norms, and their obvious foolishness eventually disappears. Everybody drinks the Koolaid.

Why is the Rapture fetish considered so particularly weird? How is it really different from believing that we fly up to heaven after we die, or are reborn in the bodies of others, or can be martyred if we kill someone who doesn't share our religious convictions? 

Come on, people, let's find drama in other places and drop this ridiculous exclusionary cult stuff. My tribe is the human tribe. What's yours?

Marketing God to the Heathens

Hey, have you noticed that my blog about humanism attracts a lot of interesting advertisements from faith-based organizations? Google has an unusual algorithm in place. Today, there are ads for no fewer than three online theology courses, five churches, a pitch for the Lutheran financial planning firm Thrivent (great name, huh?), and my favorite, an ad for a "Christian alternative to bankruptcy." The terms of service don't allow me to click on my own ads, but I'm dying to find out what the Christian alternative to bankruptcy actually is. Someone please let me know!

Secular Studies Hits Higher Ed

The New York Times recently reported on Pitzer College's new department of secular studies. This is terrific news. It's baffling that legitimate places of higher education include theology departments along with science-based programs. That's like offering a major in astronomy with a concentration in astrology. At least the medical school programs that are dipping their toes in non-traditional therapies are making efforts to study their effectiveness, or lack thereof. How can any university--other than a religious one--proudly offer religious studies outside of their sociology or cultural anthropology or history or literature or music programs? Because religion is definitely worth looking at as an historic and cultural phenomenon (I would have said oddity, but it's obviously the secularists who are the odd people out, numbers-wise). But please, let's not offer theological courses as part of a fact-based field of inquiry. Thank you, wise people of Pitzer!